Odd drug-related search queries showing up in my site referrer logs.

January 3, 2008 7:34 PM

GeekFilter: My web site/blog is suddenly showing very odd searches in the referrer logs, all for prescription drugs.

I should mention that my blog is about baseball, and while there is going to be the inevitable crack about drug usage, none of these terms are ANYWHERE on my site.

When I follow the referrers back to the origin, my site doesn't even come up listed in the search results.

I considered that there was a backdoor to the site someone had hacked and created dummy pages with those search terms. No dice. I changed my password and that of the one other user (who hadn't logged in since March). I ran a site map to see if there were other pages on the domain I didn't know about. No dice.

I queried everything logical to see if this was being discussed elsewhere and came up with nothing, but I readily accept I am probably not querying on the right thing.

Do I need to be worried about this? RIght now it's just a pain when reading my site stats. That's not a big deal now but will be in a few months when traffic picks up again.

posted by micawber to technology (2 comments total)

"Referer spam is a kind of spamdexing (spamming aimed at search engines). The technique involves making repeated web site requests using a fake referer url that points to the site the spammer wishes to advertise. Sites that publicize their access logs, including referer statistics, will then end up linking to the spammer's site, which will in turn be indexed by the search engines as they crawl the access logs. This benefits the spammer because of the free link, and also gives the spammer's site improved search engine placement due to link-counting algorithms that search engines use."
posted by lia at 7:45 PM on January 3, 2008

Beautiful. Thanks, lia.
posted by micawber at 7:51 PM on January 3, 2008